Turn down the lights, fire up the projector and light a candle if that’s your style…here’s my picks for the Top 15 Music Videos Of 2011. I tried to encompass a lot of image styles and music in this list. There’s all types of directors and production scales ranging from Canon 7D equipped bare bones budgets to freaking Michel Gondry shooting stop motion on a Bolex (or so I read). I think that’s what’s crazy and great about being a director and designer in this time. If you want to, you have access to pretty much everything (visually speaking) if you put time into it. Hopefully some directors, DPs and photographers are inspired by this, it was a good year for the moving image and I suspect it to only get better and more creative in 2012. Hope you all dig the list and if you make it through each video all the way through, no skipping…you can rule out any form of attention deficit disorder.

I haven’t listed any of these in a rank, only because they’re all good at specific things. However, if I had to pick one favorite, it’d be Eric Epstein’s magically haunting work for Memory Tapes.

Sean says:

What an excellent list! I’ve already shared a number of these gems with my friends. Some are down right cool, like Toro Y Moi’s “How I Know,” But some are simply evocative, like Lord Huron’s “Stranger.” That video is soooo sad!–but very well done. M83’s “Midnight City” is just badass. I would try to shatter glass with my brain power when I was a kid, so the video was a kind of desire brought to life.